On Fri, 2004-11-19 at 18:58, brewhaha@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca wrote:
Are you writing in FORTRAN?
Gnofract 4D is written primarily in Python with some C++ extensions.
I mean that both programs are free, and that both have ruthlessly stolen _some_ of their methods from paper publications. The copyright on FracTint, CORRECT ME IF I'M WRONG, is mostly for authenticity, although some people are in it for the notoriety of being in the credits.
So, basically, I would GUESS that you're more wary of the politics and accounting for credits than the practicality of improving XFractint with subroutines from Gnofract4D with the help of CVS (Cooperative Virtual Supervisor?...I don't know what that stands for) and Jason Osuch and then calling them identical. Vice-Versa might be better. I don't know.
No, I'm not too concerned about politics and credit (or copyright, for that matter). I've certainly stolen many ideas from Fractint (some via UltraFractal), including the formula parser language. I expect to continue to do so in future. Anyone who wants to take any code from Gnofract 4D for any purpose is free to do so, with or without attribution. The problems with a full-scale merge (IMHO) are primarily technical. Briefly, these are: o) Environment. XFractint is essentially a port of a text-based DOS package to run in an XWindow. I believe the Fractint folks would like to maintain some level of cross-platform portability (at least to DOS and Windows), hence it would be difficult to change this paradigm. o) Backwards Compatibility. It's extremely important that the huge numbers of extant .par files continue to produce the same images in the future. This means that changes to the Fractint code base have to be made very carefully, which makes it harder to make dramatic changes like changing the rendering model to create 24-bit images. o) Lack of Motivation. Frankly, attempting this would be man-years of painstaking effort. I write fractal software for fun, and have limited time available - I assume the same holds true for the Stone Soup guys. Attempting a merger with Fractint does not sound like enough fun for me to devote the next 5 years of weekends to it. If you read the Fractdev archives you'll see a long list of excitable proposals to radically revamp Fractint, all of which have foundered on this particular rock. Regards, -- Edwin PS Peter - no, Gnofract 4D doesn't work on Windows. It isn't likely to any time soon. Sorry :-( PPS CVS stands for 'Concurrent Versions System'